The problem with reviewing large collections with multiple composers, as the New Trombone Collective 3-CD set (see my post of yesterday) is that I then have to index every composer, and thus create presentation pages for each. All this will go much faster in ten years from now, when I’ve transferred all my reviews from Amazon and have created most of those composer entries already, but now, it’s tedious and exhausting: Derek Bourgeois, Martijn Padding, Sweelinck, Ruud Van Eeten, Eric Ewazen, Jacob ter Veldhuis, Enrique Crespo, Mark Nightingale, David Popper, Domenico Gabrielli, George Delerue, Joseph Jongen, Georgi Swiridow, Vincent Persichetti, Koen Kaptijn, Hans Hasebos, Louis Couperin, Saskia Apon, Debussy, Hans Koolmees, Haydn, Ilja Reijngoud, that’s 22 entries to create. My tongue is hanging like a spent horse…
As I created an entry for Ter Veldhuis, I transferred from Amazon my recent review of his String Quartets. Ter Veldhuis’ music is better than his philistine stance on “intellectualism” vs “emotions” in composition would let you expect.
As I was reconstructing the catalogs of some of those Dutch labels, NM Classics, Donemus Composer’s Voice, Etcetera, Q-Disc, I took the opportunity to buy some that both seemed appealing and sold cheap. Sometimes you’re lucky, sometimes you’re not. With this one I am: I’m listening to “Working on Time”, a disc by the Maarten Altena Ensemble on NM Classics, 92063. Doing my discographies I had seen the MAE around, but I thought it was a group of Dutch free jazz. Well, I think it is, but not only. Here it plays pieces of contemporary classical by various Dutch composers, including Altena (and one by Martijn Padding, whose work on the New Trombone Collective’s set was the one that really stood out). I read Altena’s bio, and he was conservatory-trained as a contrabassist, and plays and composes both jazz and contemporary classical. I’m half-way through the disc and, beyond the punning and clever title (some of the compositions are based on pieces of Machaut, Downland, Purcell…) it’s great, very original pieces.